We now know that the GIGABYTE X58A-UD9 can give us some great performance. However, we have not yet touched on all of the available features of this board. After all, one of the major selling points is that you can drop up to four AMD or NVIDIA graphics cards into this thing and really push the limits of graphics performance.

GIGABYTE made this board big enough for four GPUs, dropped in two NF200 chips to make sure there was enough PCIe 2.0 lanes to run them all at x16 and then topped that off with more power (dual 12-V Molex connectors) to ensure that these slots would get enough power. So, to see what we can get from this we decided to drop in three GIGABYTE GV-N470SO-13I cards. These are GTX 470 based cards from GIGABYTEs "Super Clocked" series. Each of these cards runs at a nice 700MHz core speed, up from the normal 604MHz found on the stock GTX470. They also have GIGABYTE's WindForce (aftermarket) cooling. At $349.99 a pop from NewEgg.com, this pushes our test system up to just under $1700 for the board and GPUs. That is quite a price tag to match up to.

I guess the preamble is done; let's get to benching and see if the performance meets the price.